AI hasn’t just changed how startups build; it’s broken how they sell, secure their data and customers, and scale it more rapidly than ever before. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, the AI Stage is back to dig into the single hottest topic in the community for the past few years, presented by Google for Startups. This time around, we’re exploring the business models AI is rewriting, the wealth of unsolved security gaps, and the entirely new job categories AI has created from scratch.
From October 13–15 in San Francisco at Moscone Center, join leaders from across the AI industry as they get into the real questions founders are facing right now. We’re talking about the matter of how to price AI products when models become commoditized, why agent security has to be rebuilt from the infrastructure up, and what it actually means to have a go-to-market plan in an AI-native world. We’re also closing in on the end of our current pricing window, so your chance to save up to $200 is ending soon, so grab your ticket here before it’s gone.
Without further ado, let’s see what’s on deck for the AI Stage, with more announcements to come: Most enterprise AI conversations happen before deployment. As Head of Applied AI at Anthropic, Cat de Jong works directly with the enterprises putting Claude to work across their most critical workflows — and sees patterns that never make it into press releases. Where deployments succeed immediately.
What separates the organizations extracting real value from the ones still running pilots eighteen months in. This session pulls back the curtain on what applied AI actually looks like inside the world’s most closely watched AI company — and what it reveals about where enterprise AI is really headed. With Cat de Jong, Head of Applied AI, Anthropic Two years ago, GTM engineering did not exist.
Today, it is one of the fastest growing roles in the industry, with independent practitioners building million-dollar businesses. This session traces how AI collapsed the traditional go-to-market stack and created an entirely new discipline in its place. Walk away knowing what AI-native GTM looks like in practice and how it’s changing the way companies grow.
With Tara Seshan, Head of Productivity, OpenAI AI is now making autonomous decisions inside the most sensitive enterprise systems in the world, at a speed traditional security frameworks weren’t built for. This session breaks down what enterprise AI security actually requires in 2026 — from observability and governance to the architecture that separates deployments enterprises can trust from ones they can’t afford to touch. With Arsalan Tavakoli, Co-founder and SVP of Field Engineering, Databricks Agentic AI is powerful, but it was never built to be secure.
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